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Saturday, October 26, 2013

Cyber War Will Not Take Place

Cyber war is possibly the most dangerous buzzword of the Internet
era. The fear-inducing rhetoric surrounding it is being used to justify
major changes in the way the Internet is organized, governed, and
constructed. And in Cyber War Will Not Take Place, Thomas Rid
convincingly argues that cyber war is not a compelling threat. Rid is
one of the leading cyber war skeptics in Europe, and although he doesn't
argue that war won't extend into cyberspace, he says that cyberspace's
role in war is more limited than doomsayers want us to believe. His
argument against cyber war is lucid and methodical. He divides
"offensive and violent political acts" in cyberspace into: sabotage,
espionage, and subversion. These categories are larger than cyberspace,
of course, but Rid spends considerable time analyzing their strengths
and limitations within cyberspace. The details are complicated, but his
end conclusion is that many of these types of attacks cannot be defined
as acts of war, and any future war won't involve many of these types of
attacks.
None of this is meant to imply that cyberspace is safe. Threats of
all sorts fill cyberspace, but not threats of war. As such, the policies
to defend against them are different. While hackers and criminal
threats get all the headlines, more worrisome are the threats from
governments seeking to consolidate their power. I have long argued that
controlling the Internet has become critical for totalitarian states,
and their four broad tools of surveillance, censorship, propaganda and
use control have legitimate commercial applications, and are also
employed by democracies.
A lot of the problem here is of definition. There isn't broad
agreement as to what constitutes cyber war, and this confusion plays
into the hands of those hyping its threat. If everything from Chinese
espionage to Russian criminal extortion to activist disruption falls
under the cyber war umbrella, then it only makes sense to put more of
the Internet under government -- and thus military -- control. Rid's
book is a compelling counter-argument to this approach.
Rid's final chapter is an essay unto itself, and lays out his vision
as to how we should deal with threats in cyberspace. For policymakers
who won't sit through an entire book, this is the chapter I would urge
them to read. Arms races are dangerous and destabilizing, and we're in
the early years of a cyber war arms race that's being fueled by fear and
ignorance. This book is a cogent counterpoint to the doomsayers and the
profiteers, and should be required reading for anyone concerned about
security in cyberspace.